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White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro and CNN’s Jake Tapper clashed repeatedly over President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic during a combative interview on Sunday that the CNN host abruptly ended, leaving Navarro in mid-sentence.
Navarro argued on “State of the Union” that the president took the coronavirus seriously in January, February and March after the outbreak was first reported in China despite comments Trump made in an interview with Bob Woodward that he intentionally downplayed the virus.
The Trump ally pointed out that the president acted early to ban travel from China and ramped up production of medical equipment for hospital workers while not trying to panic Americans and cause chaos.
Tapper pressed Navarro why the president wasn’t being “straightforward with the American people?”
“He was straightforward,” Navarro responded.
“No, he wasn’t,” the CNN host countered.
“There was — look, look, Jake, Jake, I’m telling you what our strategy is,” Navarro said.
“Just answer the — it’s a very basic question,” Tapper said. “You want to talk about what you want to talk about, OK?”
Navarro accused Tapper of “cherry-picking.”
“I would just like to remind the American people watching that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, and the United States has more than 20 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. That is a fact.
It does not matter how many times he insults CNN,” Tapper said at the end of the segment.
United States